A monster most every weekday. Three adventure seeds a post.
Because Pathfinder and 3.5 are more fun than work.
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Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Enlightened Contemplative

Several of the monsters in the Occult Bestiary fall into the category of “Monsters You Always Knew
Were Psychic, So Here Are Some Slightly More Powerful Versions Built With the
New Rules.” Which is totally okay by
me—it rewards GMs for buying the new books and adds complexity to existing
monster societies without erasing the non-psychic versions that came
before.Everybody wins.

So you’d assumed that enlightened contemplatives are, like, super contemplative.(Hell, ordinary contemplatives have evolved
to barely even have bodies…how much more enlightened can you get?)

But instead—unlike similar advanced occult monsters that we’ve
covered before (the xill matriarch or the yithian elder, for
instance)—enlightened contemplatives aren’t necessarily revered by their
contemplative kin.In fact, the other
contemplatives are scientists who think the esoterically minded enlightened
contemplatives are a little crazy.They
get results, sure…but at what cost?“Daring,” “reckless,” and “radical” are all words used in the Occult Bestiary to describe these
pioneers.Or are they schismatics…or heretics…or
phrenic-disrupting outright monsters?It’s up to you…and that’s what makes these brainy guys fun.

A mesmerist believes
he can have a better hold over his victims if they are exposed to the
energies of various esoteric planes and demiplanes.He is guided in his studies by an enlightened
contemplative who secretly has her own agenda, involving the use of interlaced
mindscapes and transitive planes to achieve travel between the planets.

Trapped on another
planet, adventures seek shelter from rabid plains girallons in the mountain
fastness of an order of contemplatives.The sentient brains have no answers for the party, but they suspect a
splinter coterie of contemplative renegades might. Reaching these “enlightened”
contemplatives means hiking through a thorny jungle of cannibal wood.The adventurers find the splinter
contemplatives under siege from terrible, four-armed wights.

An order of
enlightened contemplatives cannot perceive gnomes—neither their physical
forms nor their mental patterns (likely because of the gnomes’ fey
heritage).Instead they must infer
gnomes based on the descriptions and tales of other humanoids.Disturbed to encounter a phenomenon
unexplainable by either contemplative science or enlightened contemplative
metaphysics, these esoteric sages hire bounty hunters to round up gnomes to
study, creating prison camps for small folk they cannot sense and subjecting
them to laboratory experiments whose data they only dimly comprehend.

2 comments:

After reading the original contemplative page and then this one, I had the thought to combine the last entry here and the barbarian sacking of the Opal Monastery, where the barbarians are actually the players and the monastery is a front for the contemplatives. Of course, to such enlightened beings obsessesed with those types of experiments, regular mortal adventurers would seem like barbarians - and those monks at the monastery aren't there by their own will, to be sure. It practically writes itself!

By the way, please forgive the occasional typos. I am aware of them, but disagreements between MS Word and the Blogger template make my entries nearly impossible to edit once posted. I blame gremlins. You can find a more polished version of this blog over on Tumblr.